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Sunday, December 21, 2014

Linux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" Cinnamon Review: As always, Impressive!

In my last review, I discussed about Linux Mint 17.1 Mate. Today, it's turn of Linux Mint's flagship operating system Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon. The release notes states of the following improvements: "Linux Mint 17.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable to use." It discusses of the following incremental improvements:

Cinnamon 2.4 with about 30 memory leak fixes offering many little improvements to make user experience smoother and more enjoyable than before.

The Nemo toolbar was redesigned and its buttons are now configurable. A new button (hidden by default) was added to open a terminal in the current directory. Nemo supports emblems now.

For this review I downloaded the 1.5 GB 64-bit ISO of Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon. I created a live USB on a 4 GB USB drive using Linux Mint Image Writer. First, I did a live boot and then installed Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon on my laptop, Asus K55VM.

Installation
Linux Mint installation is the same as before and nothing has changed in this version. It is the same easy installation with the simple steps, as shown below. Overall, installation may take about 10-20 minutes of time depending on internet speed.

Hardware Recognition
Mint 17.1 Cinnamon worked impeccably on the system I used, recognizing the screen resolution, sound card, graphics, WIFI and LAN along with touch pad. Post-installation, I installed Nvidia drivers from the Driver Manager in System Settings / Control Center.

Aesthetics
The look and feel of the distro is the same as before, providing a consistent experience to the users. At an overall level you won't notice much change between Cinnamon 2.2 (in Linux 17 Cinnamon) and Cinnamon 2.4 (in the present release).

The menu is the same as before with a search option and is very functional with one click access to applications and favorites on the left hand side. Right click on applications in the menu gives options to add to the panel or desktop or favorites as well as uninstall the package.

The release notes talks of more polish in the desktop environments like:

Credit to and similar to GNOME Shell, the Cinnamon desktop now starts with a zoom animation.

Modules in Cinnamon Settings and categories in the application menu are now sorted alphabetically.

Similar to Windows, “Super+e” now opens up the home directory.

Cinnamon 2.4 ships with many small refinements (multiple panel launchers, improvements in the sound applet...etc) and a lot of bug fixes.

As usual, Cinnamon 2.4 ships with hundreds of themes. The theme settings are redesigned in the distro and it can be accessed from the System Settings -> Themes. I got options here to change window borders, icons, controls, mouse pointer and desktop panels. The Linux Mint theme, Mint-X, now comes in Aqua, Blue, Brown, Orange, Pink, Purple, Red, Sand and Teal.

Linux Mint 17.1 has a major improvement in collection of background wallpapers. The Background Settings are also completely redesigned and now support background slideshow. I really enjoyed the collection of wallpapers from previous Linux Mint releases and the retro wallpaper collection. They are simply awesome.

Finally, the sidebar is also improved, with highlight effects on hover and a smarter dynamic bookmark section.

The login screen preferences are also redesigned and all themes (HTML and GDM) as well as the GTK greeter are now available from the same list. A preview button, to quickly visualize the active theme, is now added.

Overall, Cinnamon 2.4 has impressive aesthetics and collection of themes to keep users interested to the distro. I am extremely pleased with what I saw. I go with full marks for aesthetics for Linux Mint Cinnamon.

The packages are mostly not of the latest stable versions, which is a little disappointing. However, on the brighter side, they are not that antiquated and possibly the incremental improvements in the latest stable versions are marginal. For example, LibreOffice is 4.2.7.2, whereas the latest stable version is 4.3.5.2 which I am using in my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, thanks to launchpad ppas.

Otherwise, the application set is decent enough to fulfill daily needs. The essential restricted and non-restricted multimedia codecs and Adobe flashplugin are all in-built in the distro. I played online videos in Firefox 34.0 and it worked smoothly. Firefox has Yahoo as the default search engine. But, you can change change search engine settings and add Google as the default one.

Cinnamon 2.4 has a nice integrated settings manager to tweak settings and look and feel of the distro. I discussed some of them in the aesthetics section.

In overall, I think Mint 17.1 Cinnamon provides a comprehensive set of applications, good enough for daily use. However, I miss a VoIP client and packages like download manager, Wine, etc. here. So, I am going with a score of 8/10.

From Control Center, you'll find the Software Sources - an application to see the official repositories, ppa and add or view additional repositories. It is very handy to add third party ppa's. It actually helped me to fix an issue of repos not updating properly as well. Pretty handy GUI for those who are not adept at the terminal, I must say.

As I mentioned, LibreOffice package is a bit antiquated in Linux Mint 17.1. So, to keep updated with the latest packages, specially in case of LTS releases, I trust on launchpad ppa's. To make my system more usable and to continue using the latest stable packages (remember it is an LTS and packages become antiquated within 6 months!), I installed several utility ppa's through terminal, namely:

Once it's installed, you'll firstly need to authorize it with Google, by running the following command:
$ google-drive-ocamlfuse
Now let's mount Google Drive. Create a folder in your home directory, let's call it "gdrive":
mkdir ~/gdrive

Though document viewer works perfectly fine, but at times I require Adobe acrobat reader, especially for dynamic content. Installation of Adobe acroread is a bit tricky and I document here, what worked with me. I downloaded the AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.bin file from Adobe website and put it in the home directory. I opened terminal and ran the following commands:

$ sudo chmod +x ./AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.bin

$ sudo ./AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.bin

Agree to whatever options it asks and once installed it is time to install 32-bit architecture, if your OS is 64-bit.

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Post installation, Adobe Acrobat Reader should work without any issue.

Performance

As always what happens with every Mint release, Linux Mint always works! I found the distro very stable and offer very good performance. Based on my benchmark tests, the results of resource usage and boot time are given below:

Boot time

With autologin enabled, the Mint 17.1 Cinnamon took about 46 seconds to boot which is 15% higher than the average boot time of all GNOME and GNOME forked distros I have used on the same machine, Asus K55VM, between 2013-14.

On my benchmarking tests, Linux Mint 17.1 performed admirably and is one of the most efficient of all the GNOME or GNOME forked distros I tried recentluny. This is a recent benchmark I added and hence, the number of distros in this benchmark is low. If I compare to Ubuntu 14.10, the latest release of Ubuntu, Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon consumes 7% lower power and provides better battery life.

Here I compare the performances of both the distros. In terms of RAM consumption, both Mate (without Compiz) and Cinnamon are almost similar. However, Mint Mate beats Mint Cinnamon hands down with 35% lower boot time and 6% lower power consumption.

Operating System

Release Year

Size of ISO (GB)

Base

Desktop

Linux kernel

CPU (%)

RAM usage (MB)

Size of installation (GB)

Boot time (sec)

Power (Watt)

Mint 17.1 Cinnamon

2014

1.5

Ubuntu Trusty

Cinnamon 2.4

3.13.0

0-5%

362

4.90

46

11.24

Mint 17.1 Mate

2014

1.6

Ubuntu Trusty

Mate 1.8.1

3.13.0

0-5%

349

5.30

30

10.59

One thing works in favor of Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon is its superb aesthetics. Mint 17.1 Mate makes up a bit with impressive compiz effects but still the Cinnamon release looks better.

Overall

I am very happy with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon. It looks great with very polished interface, hundreds of attractive wallpapers, easy customization options and awesome collection of themes. The distro offers really good performance and excellent battery life. If you are looking for a functional distro which offers attractive looks and impressive performance, I definitely feel you should try out Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon.

Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions and they can be downloaded from here.

Do you have a comprehensive list somewhere where you have all your reviews ranked by rating? That should be on the front page of your Blog! Great review. I've been using both 17.1 Mate AND Cinnamon, and frankly they are both so good it's hard to decide between them. I seem to be a little more functional in Cinnamon, just because of how *I* work already in it on my main desktop, but MATE is definitely a home run as well. Thanks for the excellent review as always!

Nice review! Both Mint Mate and Cinnamon are great distros. I just wish Mint had a Gnome 3 distro.

I'm currently running openSUSE Tumbleweed Gnome and enjoying it immensely. Any chance of reviewing openSUSE Tumbleweed Gnome? The new Tumbleweed is now a rolling release but it's rock solid. The Linux version is currently 3.17.4-1, and the Gnome Shell version is currently 3.14.2.

Yes, there is very small difference in RAM consumption between the two distros and Cinnamon can work better in certain machines over Mate. I guess that is what both my benchmarking results and your results show. Both are equally good distros and Cinnamon has improved significantly with every release.

How do you put those things on the Desktop? Date and all those specifications about the ram usage etc and the time . And also the clock in the middle of the desktop. COuld you tell me how to put that on ? Thank You .

I am also running a 8 core system, (Intel Xeon E5420) and like you only 4 cores (x4) are shown, is that because it's a duel quad core system or mint 17.1 can't see all 8 cores? I tried a few other distros, and they can see all 8 cores. Thanks for any help.

Great review as always but Cinnamon Mint 17.1 runs smoothly on powerful systems. I have a netbook N2830 and 2 Gb RAM and experience some issues like the system is slow or unresponsive or delay in opening apps and you need to upgrade the kernel version to fix the wifi issue. I am using google Chrome browser and I will feel the slowness of my system when im trying to to open 3 tabs. Yeah i know Chrome is heavy but its the favored browser in my family and it consumes 80% of my RAM after opening 3 tabs with multimedia in each site. For smooth and faster experience in my opinion..you must have at least 4 GB of RAM and powerful CPU/GPU.